and whom he disappointed by accepting his invitation at once, and not Maydening it; no insignificant term as he applies it: for, as he says,
Who looks for double biddings to a feast,
May dine at home for an importune guest.
After a sumptuous bill of fare, our author compares the great plenty of it to our present notion of a miser's feast—saying,
Come there no more; for so meant all that cost;
Never hence take me for thy second host.
The fourth is levelled at Ostentation in devotion, or in dress. The fifth represents the sad plight of a courtier, whose Perewinke, as he terms it, the wind had blown off by unbonnetting in a salute, and exposed his waxen crown or scalp. 'Tis probable this might be about the time of their introduction into dress here. The sixth, which is a fragment, contains a hyperbolical relation of a thirsty foul, called Gullion, who drunk Acheron dry in his passage over it, and grounded Charon's boat, but floated it again, by as liberal a stream of urine. It concludes with the following sarcastical, yet wholesome irony.
Drinke on drie foule, and pledge Sir Gullion:
Drinke to all healths, but drink not to thyne owne.
The seventh and last is a humorous description of a famished beau, who had dined only with duke Humfrey, and who was strangely adorned with exotic dress.
To these three satires he adds the following conclusion.
Thus have I writ, in smoother cedar tree,
So gentle Satires, penn'd so easily.
Henceforth I write in crabbed oak-tree rynde,
Search they that mean the secret meaning find.
Hold out ye guilty and ye galled hides,
And meet my far-fetched stripes with waiting sides.
In his biting satires he breathes still more of the spirit and stile of Juvenal, his third of this book being an imitation of that satirist's eighth, on Family-madness and Pride of Descent; the beginning of which is not translated amiss by our author. The principal object of his fourth satire, Gallio, would correspond with a modern Fribble, but that he supposes him capable of hunting and hawking, which are exercises rather too coarse and indelicate for ours: this may intimate perhaps, that the reign of the great Elizabeth had no character quite so unmanly as our age. In advising him to wed, however, we have no bad portrait of the Petit Maitre.